Seeking to support former Home Secretary GK Pillai’s charge against the then UPA government over the Ishrat Jahan case, BJP on Friday referred to two articles written by Arun Jaitley in which the Finance Minister had accused the Congress-led government changing affidavit to implicate Narendra Modi.
The articles, written by Jaitley in June 2013 and February 2014 when he was the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha and Prime Minister Modi, then Gujarat Chief Minister.
In his 2014 article, Jaitley had accused the UPA of changing its stand in the Ishrat encounter case in a bid to implicate Modi which, he added, had caused “irreparable damage” to the country’s intelligence agencies and their ability to undertake covert operations against terror. In 2013, he had written that “growing Modi phobia” in the Congress was behind the CBI move to question IB in the Ishrat case and said such “misuse” of government institutions for political purposes will destroy them.
BJP re-issued the articles a day after Pillai, who was then Home Secretary, said the affidavit submitted to the Gujarat High Court in 2009 about LeT links of Ishrat Jahan and her accomplices, who were killed in an alleged fake encounter in 2004, was changed at the “political level”.